Jarosław Kaczyński has warned of the “parasites” Muslim refugees carryFLICKR: PIOTR DRABIK

No matter how you’ve been spending your summer this year, there are two words which have been unavoidable. Slaving away in internships, travelling remote corners of the globe, scrolling through Facebook in your room, you will have been unable to escape these topics of conversation. They are, of course, Brexit and Trump.

As I travelled around Europe this summer on the Cambridge Student Travel Award, they rather obviously came up. The alumni I met, the people I chatted to in hostels, the kids I spoke to in schools, wanted to know my opinion on the UK’s EU referendum, and the US presidential election inevitably followed swiftly after as a conversation topic; the two seem, in the public mind at least, intrinsically linked as the symptoms of the failure of Western democracy and the rise of a more extreme right wing.

We all know this. We all have read, listened to and postulated theory after theory to explain the shifts in the public mood. The problem is social media acting as an echo chamber, validating people’s own opinions and intensifying them, we may say. We are living in the era of the anti-expert; these are disillusioned protest votes, another may claim. Perhaps you have your own pet theory. But, the issue at hand is the fact that we do not step back from our US-UK-centric, anglicised view of the world.

Media is fond of a story, a narrative. This is a very successful one. First Brexit, then Trump, next the world in flames. This is something people can grasp, and follow while anxiously biting their nails and muttering about the state of the country. But it is a simplification of the case. Travelling around Europe and talking to people who live in the Baltic States, Poland, and Hungary has made me acutely aware of the fact that the UK and the US are not the only two countries with problematic politics at the moment.

Let’s look for instance at Poland. The country has a prime minister, but the Cambridge alumni I met there all explained to me that the real power is vested in a man named Jarosław Kaczyński, the Chairman and co-founder of the Law and Justice party, which currently rules Poland. This is a man who has said that Poland cannot take Muslim refugees because of the parasites they may be carrying, but if you look him up on BBC News, there are only 10 search results from this year.

Five of these are about Brexit opinions and reactions. Three are about the tragic plane crash which killed his twin brother. There is one story, however, about plans to tighten abortion laws. The rules in Poland are already pretty strict, only allowing the procedure in instances of rape, incest, danger to the mother’s life or foetal medical problems. Poland’s ultra-conservative, Catholic population wishes to reduce these rights, and polling shows that Polish support for abortion in these cases has dropped since 1992. When in Poland, I saw a striking piece of graffiti which scrawled “keep your rosaries off my ovaries”, neatly summarising the problem.

The other news story is about EU talks over the ongoing dispute between the Polish government and its Constitutional Court, a complex issue which I’m not going to claim to wholly understand, but which has led to debate over the extent to which politics should intervene with the law.

You might be wondering, somewhat justifiably, at this point why I am writing this. I do not claim to be an expert in Polish politics. I do not want to educate you on the issue. Rather, I am using this as an example of something we are not paying attention to. Of course we cannot pay attention to everything that is happening in the world, although for the first time in history, this is now technically possible.

The point I am trying to make is that we should be wary of the narrative the media is selling us. Newspapers, news sites, and journalists know that the public are most interested in two things: namely, things which are close to home and things which are sensational. Brexit and Trump fulfil both of those criteria, being in the English-speaking world and shocking. Central/ Eastern European politics do not: they feel distant and separate from our country, our world, and they are not shocking in the sense that major events have occurred, but rather that a shift in public opinion and politics has happened over a period of time. Therefore, it is not ‘good’ news for reporters to focus on, and this means it does not become part of the general public’s consciousness.

This is an issue. Trump and Brexit are not the only or the first events in a slide towards more radical, right-wing politics. They are part of a broader trend which is spreading slowly, but undoubtedly, across Europe. In the global community that exists today, it is extremely important that we understand these events as related, and that we look to other countries to better understand what is happening in our own. We need to inform ourselves, to equip ourselves to fight that rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

Brexit, as ever, further complicates things. While our world view is narrowed and partly obscured by our introspective fixation on our relationship with the EU, Brexit means that exactly the opposite is now necessary. As a country, we will now have to establish our own individuals relations with what were our fellow members of the EU, as well as countries across the globe, rather than relying on the European trade negotiators. “Success! Freedom! Triumph!” cry the Brexiteers, but it is now even more important that we understand the subtleties and nuances of each country’s politics.